Here’s the fifteenth of my roundup of my favorite stories from the past year.

Previous selections are here: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008.

5) The New Yorker: When Trucks Fly

An exploration of the skill, culture and community around Monster Jam.

Eichelberger, in a truck named ThunderROARus, zoomed down the elevated dirt ramp and flew so far over the row of nine trucks that the vehicle rammed into a barrier at the edge of the field. Eichelberger was fine—he got out and saluted the crowd. Meents looked elated. I couldn’t help but feel a little underwhelmed. I’d seen a version of this a few times now—a big truck flying high and far. How quickly we desire more. This was Monster Jam’s trap: a never-before-seen trick can happen only once. Awe is a hard thing to maintain.

Maybe it was the premeditation. During the freestyle, a driver named Todd Leduc, who drove Megalodon, a truck that looks like a shark, took off for a ramp without warning and pulled the biggest backflip most people had ever seen. He went maybe fifty feet in the air. He seemed out of control. This wasn’t entirely true—when airborne, drivers can speed up their rotation by spinning the tires, or slow it down by pressing the brakes. “If we had wings, we’d fly out of the building,” Kenny told me. When Leduc reached his apex, I thought he would over-rotate and crash into the ground roof first. But he tapped the brakes, and slammed down flat on the tires. A guy in the stands turned shrill: “WHAT?!? HOLY MOTHERF****** S***!” This was what we’d come to see: we’d spent an entire day in the heat and the rain, a little bored, in the hope that a twelve-thousand-pound fibreglass shark might briefly ascend toward space. Who in the crowd could imagine what it felt like to be in Leduc’s seat?

4) Louisville Courier Journal: Louisville home filled with ‘explosive materials’ will be burned down after investigation

Not an uplifting tale, but one I could not look away from. A former chemist was arrested for hoarding dangerous chemicals in his home and the local government thought the “safest way to proceed” would be to burn everything down. [Fortunately the EPA intervened and carefully removed the chemicals instead of releasing them into the environment and community.]

Last week, Louisville Metro Police and federal agents investigated a Highview man’s home after being informed that he had homemade explosives. Now, city officials are taking additional action.

At a press conference Tuesday morning, Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg declared a state of emergency as Metro Code Enforcement personnel prepare to demolish the home and its attached garage.

3) Read Max: True Life: For reasons I don’t fully understand I bought hundreds of Cold War-era military slides on eBay

An impeccable tale of one poor sap’s scanning odyssey in pursuit of America’s hidden military presentation history. It is worth viewing the full collection and I will tempt you to click with the solitary footnote:

The actual scanning process is elaborate and time-consuming as an occult rite. At first I had hoped the (very expensive) flatbed photo scanner at the local library, which could process 15 slides at a time and would cost me zero dollars to use, would be more than sufficient. This was foolish: I convinced myself the results were slightly blurry and unsuitable for my audience of completely imaginary people who cared about what I was up to. Instead, I opted to buy a used Plustek OpticFilm 7600i SE, a bread loaf-sized device made specifically for scanning mounted slides—one at a time. Before you even press a button, each requires a careful dusting with a brush, perhaps a puff of compressed air, and even a ginger microfiber rub-down. Although one archivist reassured me that I “won’t hurt the film physically unless you pour acid on it or light it on fire,” I handle each like a treasure. Once cleaned, the scanning software will, very, very slowly, turn the tiny photograph inside into a TIFF image file, a digital image format created back when some of these slides were. This required hours of carefully calibrating the scanning app’s settings, a process akin to communing with an angry spirit, sinking me into delirium as I tried to figure out whether I’m the first human in the history of the species to be able to tell the difference between a photo scanned at 3600 versus 4000 DPI. In search of answers, if not peace, I’ve scoured endless Reddit threads, long-forgotten early aughts message boards filled with Germans arguing about image sensors, memorized university library resources, and sat patiently through YouTube tutorials. But as tedious as this sounds, the tedium has only begun when you hit “scan.”

2) Bloomberg Businessweek: The Gambler Who Beat Roulette

I will be shocked if this isn’t turned into a feature film.

One spring evening, two men and a woman walked into the Ritz Club casino, an upmarket establishment in London’s West End. Security officers in a back room logged their entry and watched a grainy CCTV feed as the trio strolled past high gilded arches and oil paintings of gentlemen posing in hats. Casino workers greeted them with hushed reverence.

The security team paid particularly close attention to one of the three, their apparent leader. Niko Tosa, a Croatian with rimless glasses balanced on the narrow ridge of his nose, scanned the gaming floor, attentive as a hawk. He’d visited the Ritz half a dozen times over the previous two weeks, astounding staff with his knack for roulette and walking away with several thousand pounds each time. A manager would later say in a written statement that Tosa was the most successful player he’d witnessed in 25 years on the job. No one had any idea how Tosa did it. The casino inspected a wheel he’d played at for signs of tampering and found none.

1) Atmos Magazine: In the Dead of Night, a Deafening War

A wonderful deep dive into the brutal and beautiful evolutionary innovation of the 60 million year old war between bats and moths.

Corcoran, a biologist at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, just set the stage for one of nature’s oldest wars: bats versus moths. What’s to follow is a battle featuring echolocation, chemical defense, sonar jamming, stealth pursuit, and acoustic illusions, all piling on in an earsplitting, ultrasonic din—earsplitting, at least, if you have ultrasonic microphones to tune in.

“All this stuff is happening every night in everybody’s backyard,” said Dr. Nick Dowdy, a biologist at the Milwaukee Public Museum. “We just can’t hear it.”

Happy New Year! This is my fourteenth edition of my favorite stories from the previous year.

Previous selections are here: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008.

5) The New York Times: Love Triangle Challenges Reign of Japan’s Monkey Queen

A wonderful and brief window into some drama in a simian society.

​​The Japanese macaque, also known as the snow monkey, is a highly intelligent species native to Japan. It is well known for its beet-red bottom and affinity for soaking in hot springs.

While many animals, including bees, hyenas and elephants, live in female-led societies, a hostile takeover by a female “is very rare in Japanese macaque society, and only a few cases have been reported in the history of primatology,” Yu Kaigaishi, a research fellow at the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, said in an email.

4) The Atlantic: The Economic Principle That Helps Me Order at Restaurants

An overly academic analysis of the reasoning to order many plates to share.

People with high levels of openness might be more into sharing food, so that they can sample more dishes. That is definitely me when I go to a restaurant—personally, what I truly want, and I am admittedly a weirdo, is two to three bites of everything on the menu.

Paul Freedman, a historian at Yale and the author of Ten Restaurants That Changed America, told me that centuries ago, Chinese emperors would occasionally have banquets in which a couple hundred dishes would be served, and that at one abundant royal feast in 15th-century England, dozens of species of fish were served. Those preposterous spreads are basically my dream, but because I cannot live like a monarch of old, I will settle for sharing a far more modest number of dishes with my dining companions. (An important clarification: I am not arguing in favor of what restaurants call small plates, which are invariably expensive and insubstantial. I want normal-size plates, and I want to share them.)

3) The Washington Post: How not to talk with Africa about climate change

The president of Nigeria shares a critical perspective for global climate discussions.

The Western countries are unable to take politically difficult decisions that hurt domestically. Instead, they move the problem offshore, essentially dictating that the developing world must swallow the pill too bitter for their own voters’ palates. Africa didn’t cause the mess, yet we pay the price. At this year’s COP, that should be the starting point for all negotiations.

2) The New York Times Magazine: Could I Survive the ‘Quietest Place on Earth’?

Caity Weaver is one of my favorite writers and I’m glad she checked this out so I don’t have to.

In a leafy Minneapolis neighborhood under a thick cloak of ivy stands a modest concrete building. Contained within the building is silence exceeding the bounds of human perception. This hush is preserved in a small room, expensively engineered to be echoless. Certain people find the promise of such quiet irresistible; it entices them, like a soundless siren call, to visit the building at great personal cost. The room of containment, technically an “anechoic chamber,” is the quietest place on the planet — according to some. According to others, it’s more like the second-quietest. It is quieter than any place most people will ever go, unless they make a point of going to multiple anechoic chambers over the course of a lifetime.

What happens to people inside the windowless steel room is the subject of wild and terrible speculation. Public fascination with the room exploded 10 years ago, with an article on The Daily Mail’s website. “The Longest Anyone Can Bear Earth’s Quietest Place is 45 Minutes,” The Mail declared. The story left readers to extrapolate their own conclusions about why this was so from the short, haunting observations of the room’s soft-spoken proprietor, Steven J. Orfield, of Orfield Laboratories.

1) The Washington Post: Cutting-edge tech made this tiny country a major exporter of food

An article on the incredible agricultural technology in Netherlands was my favorite in 2017 and I just can’t help but be fascinated again.

The rallying cry in the Netherlands started two decades ago, as concern mounted about its ability to feed its 17 million people: Produce twice as much food using half as many resources.

The country, which is a bit bigger than Maryland, not only accomplished this feat but also has become the world’s second largest exporter of agricultural products by value behind the United States. Perhaps even more significant in the face of a warming planet: It is among the largest exporters of agricultural and food technology. The Dutch have pioneered cell-cultured meat, vertical farming, seed technology and robotics in milking and harvesting — spearheading innovations that focus on decreased water usage as well as reduced carbon and methane emissions.

Hello again and happy New Year!

My blog updates are now quite sparse since I have new responsibilities, but I’d like to at least continue one tradition: starting a new year with some stories that stuck with me from the old year.

Thank you for stopping by and you can read previous editions here: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008.

5) The Wall Street Journal: Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls, Company Documents Show

A maddening investigation showing the harmful impacts of social media design and Facebook’s refusal to address them — all based on internal research.

For the past three years, Facebook has been conducting studies into how its photo-sharing app affects its millions of young users. Repeatedly, the company’s researchers found that Instagram is harmful for a sizable percentage of them, most notably teenage girls.

“We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” said one slide from 2019, summarizing research about teen girls who experience the issues.

“Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression,” said another slide. “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”

Among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, 13% of British users and 6% of American users traced the desire to kill themselves to Instagram, one presentation showed.

4) The New York Times: Peter Warner, 90, Seafarer Who Discovered Shipwrecked Boys, Dies

I started reading more obituaries in 2021 and this fellow sounds like quite a character. I also wasn’t familiar with the (incredibly positive!) true story that inspired Lord of the Flies.

Peter Raymond Warner was born on Feb. 22, 1931, in Melbourne, Australia, to Arthur George Warner and Ethel (Wakefield) Warner. Arthur Warner was one of the country’s wealthiest men, having built a manufacturing and media empire, and he expected his son to follow him in the family business.

But Peter was uninterested; he preferred boxing and sailing, and at 17 he ran away from home to join a ship’s crew. When he returned a year later, his father made him go to law school at the University of Melbourne.

He lasted six weeks. He ran away again, this time to sail for three years on Swedish and Norwegian ships. Quick with languages, he learned enough Swedish to pass the master mariner’s exam, allowing him to captain even the largest seagoing vessels.

3) The New Yorker: Could the Teen Magazine Rise Again?

An interesting and hopeful read about the future of structured content for teens with a focus on community and the challenge of fighting algorithms that teach kids what’s trending is true.

[…] instead of hearing misinformation from a friend, teens are listening to strangers in California with millions of followers (and perceived credibility) on TikTok. At such a formative age, young people “need some really solid guidance, and the last place they want to get it is their parents,” she said. “Who are they turning to? For my child, it scares the shit out of me who she’s turning to.” During Rubenstein’s Seventeen years, she and the staff “wanted to make sure everything in the magazine was right, that it made sense,” she said. “It went through a really serious vetting process. That is gone. These children do not have access to any vetting, you know? No one’s vetting their TikTok videos.” (See: the nutmeg challenge.)

2) The New York Times: Man Gets 4 Years in $126 Million Printer Toner Fraud

I’m not surprised fraud festered in the printer toner market, which is already known for ludicrous pricing, but this story stuck with me due to the scale of the situation and the puns.

In announcing the arrest of Mr. Michaels and 20 other people accused of being connected to the scheme in 2016, the Huntington Beach Police Department in California called it “Operation Tone It Down.” The authorities said at the time that Mr. Michaels had previously received court warnings about deceptive telemarketing practices.

TonerNews.com, a website devoted to writing about printing supplies, called Mr. Michaels “the California toner pirate godfather” in a post on Sunday. Mr. Michaels’s lawyer scoffed at the moniker.

1) The New York Times: Paris Teenager’s New Gig: Would-Be Queen of Italy. A Nation Shrugs.

This story has everything. Regal altercations, a fencing romance, murder from a yacht, an LA food truck and a thoroughly disinterested Italian public.

While Vittoria’s father in Monte Carlo and mother in Paris were as delighted as her grandparents in Gstaad about her ascension to the top of Italy’s would-be royal family, a rival branch of Savoias were not pleased. Not at all.

“Totally illegitimate,” said Prince Aimone di Savoia Aosta, a cousin and rival claimant, who works as an executive for the Pirelli tire company in Moscow.

And so began the latest chapter in an ongoing dynastic dispute between the pretenders to Italy’s pretend throne. There are bitter feelings, thrown punches, warring noble committees, dukedom politics and as of last month, Vittoria’s ascending social media status.

What there is not is an actual crown to fight over.

Taken on February 4th, 2019.

Taken on February 6th, 2019.

Taken on February 8th, 2019.